This watchdog blog, by journalist Norman Oder, offers analysis, commentary, and reportage about the $4.9 billion project to build the Barclays Center arena and 16 high-rise buildings at a crucial site in Brooklyn. Dubbed Atlantic Yards by developer Forest City Ratner in 2003, it was rebranded Pacific Park in 2014 after the Chinese government-owned Greenland Group bought a 70% stake in 15 towers. New York State still calls it Atlantic Yards. Contact: AtlanticYardsReport[at]hotmail.com

Sunday, May 06, 2012

Visiting the Brooklyn Museum last night for an exhibition on artist Keith Haring's early work, I was reminded how Haring made a practice of drawing on the temporarily unused advertising panels in New York City subway stations.

The explanation:

In the subway, his personal, open-ended images alongside a blitz of corporate advertising made an implicit statement about the role of corporate culture in shaping the urban environment.

Well, what was an outlaw critique is now iconic fare for a museum.

The commodification of the Nets

Given such precedent, perhaps we should take more seriously the artistic/satirical responses to the relentless commodification of the Brooklyn Nets and the Barclays Center.

Let's start with the postcard-sized sticker featuring Bruce Ratner's face (above right), distributed at the 5/1/10 last night of Freddy's Bar & Backroom in its Prospect Heights location. Surely it was unwitting, but the shape of Ratner's head is not too far off from the "shield" used in the primary Nets' logo.

Activist and graphic designer Daniel Goldstein took the #HelloBrooklyn empty shield, unveiled before the actual logo reveal, and turned it into "HelloBullshit."

That's kind of pugnacious, and surely over the line for some people, but if Nets/Barclays Center CEO Brett Yormark is going to keep claiming that there were "34 lawsuits" (Ratner says 37; there were closer to ten), then "bullshit" is hardly out of line. Ditto for Ratner's claim that "the arena was made for hockey and basketball."